Well, on Thursday, June 14th, 2012 we woke up to 3 Finnish Landrace ewe lambs!! But, sad to say one was dead . . . I don't know if it was stillborn or if it just did not get cleaned off quick enough:(
Here are some pictures ~
These pictures are not really good I just snapped them real quick . . . will try to get some better ones sometime.
How do you like the Tunis breed?
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about them for a while now.
Are you sheep dual purpose breeds?
Great photos BTW!
Well the reasons why we like the Tunis sheep are:
Delete~ They are very hardy
~ Very easy to take care of
~ Have real nice fleeces
~ They have VERY docile and calm personalities (wether bottle fed or not)
~ Easy births
~ great mothers
~ Their meat is excellent tasting, I have heard (we have not tried it yet)
~ They stay fat on very little
~ And the biggest reason is because they grow like weeds! We have tried both straight Tunis lambs and cross bred Tunis lambs, they seem to grow about the same. I documented the growth of one of our Tunis lambs that was born just this year (a Tunis/Katahdin cross lamb). He was 13 pounds when he was born and I weighed him almost every week until he was 8 weeks old. At the beginning it was averaging out to be about 10 pounds a week and then I weighed him when he was 8 weeks old (before we sold him) and he weighed out to be 60 pounds. Last year (2011) the same Tunis ewe who had the lamb above had a straight Tunis lamb and when he was 10 or 12 weeks old he weighed about 80 pounds.
You can see my post that I did about the Tunis breed here - http://littlehillssheepranch.blogspot.com/2012/03/about-tunis-sheep-breed.html
"Are you sheep dual purpose breeds?" - Well we are working on selling about half of our flock right now, the ones being sold are sheep that are not really dual purpose breeds. After we sell them then yes our sheep will be dual/multi purpose breeds.
We are narrowing down to about 3 breeds:
~ Tunis (which I told you about above)
~ Katahdins (a meat breed)
~ Finnish Landrace sheep (they are used for wool, meat and milk, they are not really called a dairy breed, but they are used in a lot of sheep dairies)
Fill free to email or call us also . . .our email and phone number is on our "Contacts" page.
Thanks,
Haleluyah
Little Hills Sheep Ranch